Pineal Gland, Mindful Dying, Melanin, and Lucid Dreaming
When your beautiful temple of a body wants
attention, heed it.
It’s awesome how things happen. Over the past
year, I’ve been doing a lot of lucid dream work. If you haven’t explored LD,
you are missing out on some of the most profound psychic experiences you can
have. For a basic explanation of LD, go here:
I started exploring lucid dreaming in
college. A friend was training himself in LD, and mentioned the practice to me.
I gave it a go with some success, but dropped the ball under the pressures of
graduate school, study abroad, writing a difficult master’s thesis, and
eventually, Ph.D. studies. But after all that proving myself in academia, I
returned to LD. Then, 2015 saw a strong, renewed interest for me.
Lucid dreaming, in the simplest terms I can think
of, is a take-charge-of-your-dream-life experience of oneness with all. Individual
consciousness separates us from the world. I am the subject; everything else is
the object. Me, you. Us, them. This, as all Buddhists know, is an illusion - the
illusion of self. It’s personally damaging, and keeps us from attaining
samsara. In an LD, the illusion of self collapses. Subject and object are one.
It’s liberating, exhilarating, eye opening, and life changing. LD is a form of
spiritual path. But please read up on it to get a better breakdown than this.
So here’s what happened. I stumbled across
this chaga tea recently, and fell in love with its taste and medicinal
properties. I’m pretty much obsessed. And incidentally, this past year has seen
a strong personal focus on third eye opening, which is a necessary property of
lucid dreaming.
In researching chaga, I discovered that one
of its most powerful and prolific constituents is melanin (found mainly in the
chaga ‘bark’). Melanin is that dark stuff that gives you your eye, skin, and
hair color, but it is also a critical polymer needed for the function of the
pineal gland, that rice-sized body in your epithalamus that secretes melatonin,
a hormone that governs sleep patterns (and therefore, consciousness). Because
of its location and function, the pineal gland is considered the seat of the
third eye.
At the moment of death, the pineal gland
dumps a bucket load of DMT into the brain. DMT is a powerful hallucinogenic
that drives feelings of intense euphoria and cancels out pain. It seems to me
that this is the body’s final act of kindness: mitigating the difficulty of
death. It’s been observed that for several minutes after clinical death, the
tidal wave of DMT in your brain continues to ease any last perceptible stress.
Chaga is an absolute superfood for the pineal
gland. So what a coincidence that I’ve been focusing on third eye ascension so
intently, and just happen to stumble across chaga. Organic, wild harvested
chaga is so chock full of melanin that one would be smart to not drink too much
chaga tea. A gallon over 3 days is probably the most you should take. I’ll
never come near to consuming that much.
So there you go. Mindful living and mindful
dying, both facilitated by the melanin in chaga.
Things always, always go like this. The body
has a dearth that leads the mind to a subconscious process of seeking a
solution. The third eye is sluggish. Out of nowhere, chaga catches the eye.
Chaga is melanin rich. Melanin feeds and vitalizes the pineal gland - the seat
of the third eye.
It’s cold and rainy today. I made a pot of po
cha this morning. This rich Tibetan black tea is fortifying and comforting in
winter.
I’m looking forward to tonight. My beautiful
husband and I are going out to dinner, picking up some Christmas goodies, going
home, firing up the fireplace, and watching the football game.
All is blessed, and I’m grateful.
I’ll never stop being amazed with the oneness
of it all.
May your life force grow and prosper
